Poetry
by Pathetic Fallacy
Summary: Rain always brings out the worst in people. Oneshot. It's actually classified as a 'vignette'.


_Okay. Okay. I saw... I saw behind the scenes... stuff... of House, one of those specials, the other day, and Hugh Laurie was talking, and I am so... weirded out, now. I mean, I knew he was English, but... GAH. The... my brain's all... destabilized._

_Anyway, I wrote this because I was bored and fed up with being forced to read poetry and make insightful comments on said poetry. It could probably be a lot better than it is. I may or may not revise it later but I thought I'd post it before I got too fed up with it and deleted it in a fit of petulant rage. T__hat happens depressingly often._

_I don't own House, I'd probably be better at this if I did._

_Anyway, onwards and upwards._

_

* * *

Poetry. Plenty of stuff to compare to poetry._

House watched the rain on the outside of the window pane, lifted a hand to trace the path of one stubborn drop as it made its way down the glass with a single-minded determination. Pointless, pointless journey. But who was he to judge?

He was in his office, listlessly plodding through paperwork on fear of death. It was mid-morning. It had been raining since the previous afternoon, and House was bored. Excruciatingly bored. Bored to the point of considering poetry, which was saying something.

He nudged the window reflectively; let his chair spin back around to face the front of his office. Poetry had been one of those quiet obsessions that made you feel cool in high-school then embarrassed you for the rest of your life. He'd been the sort of teenager who sat up late at night writing angst-laden pieces on the state of the world. Unlike many, he'd never quite grown out of it.

No-one knew, of course. He considered it a weak point and even Wilson wasn't going to find out. He imagined the Talks that would follow, the talks with a capital T (those were invariably the worst kind). Wilson could be as bad as Cameron sometimes.

God.

Forget Wilson, what about Cameron?

There would be a hell he'd never get out of. The woman was like a deranged kitten, pounced on anything that movedif iteven slightly resembled the idea that House wasn't a caustic unfeeling bastard. He'd spent time and effort on his 'caustic unfeeling bastard' routine and he wasn't going to let something like poetry destroy all that. She'd get all doey-eyed at him then start needling him to let her read something he'd written. No, keep well away from Cameron with this sort of thing.

Besides, he hadn't written anything for ages.

Poetry. It sounded ridiculous, when you thought about it. What moron had decided to string some words together on the basis that they rhymed?

And then there were the hundreds of different kinds of poetry with rules and meters and God knew what. Intriguing thought, though. You could categorize poems, you could categorize people. Could you categorize people as poems?

There was an interesting thought. More interesting than paperwork, at any rate.

He glanced through the glass of his office window, spotted Foreman striding down the hallway with his usual blunt, determined air. What sort of a poem was Foreman? A couplet, he decided. Simple, simple things, but they could be as complex as you wanted them to be. All depended on the writer, really, how clever you could get with rhymes, how you could use your syllables. They could be part of more complex pieces, too, without much fuss or blowing of trumpets. Simple formats, almost unlimited potential. Foreman made a good couplet.

He spotted Chase, then, staring with apparent fascination at a new poster on the corridor wall opposite to the door of House's office. House lifted the ball on his desk, threw it hard against his office door – the resulting thud made Chase leap about a foot in the air before throwing a hunted look into House's office and hurrying off down the corridor with a flush in his cheeks.

Acrostic poem. Childlike, ridiculous, generally regarded as the easiest form of poetry around. Five year olds wrote them, for God's sake. All about the image, acrostics, they decorated posters everywhere, with added novelty of being able to read the subject matter in the first letter of the word. A novelty which wore off about three seconds beforeyou even read the poem, if it could even be called that.Acronyms, and stupid ones. Not without their merits, he added grudgingly, but silly all the same. Suited Chase.

He glanced at his watch, knew that it was just about time that Cuddy would charge into his office and demand he did something or other. Cuddy, what was Cuddy? Cuddy was a limerick. No-one liked limericks, he decided with some malice. They were fun, that could be said, but they had an incredibly rigid meter, were predictable as all hell, and were the opposite of versatile.

"Have you finished yet?"

"Speak of the devil," House said, affecting surprise as he glanced up to see her standing in his doorway.

"You've got clinic duty this afternoon. No dodging this time or I'll feed you your clipboard."

And, House thought with a grimace, they didn't have a very wide range of subject matter. Cuddy glared at him for a minute more, before spinning around and marching out of the office, elbowing aside a bewildered looking intern as she did so. There was another thing about limericks. They stood alone. House moved on.

Wilson was a haiku. This didn't require much thought at all. Haikus were beautiful, symmetrical, caught the eye – he grinned at this thought, wondered what his friend's reaction would be to the idea. They were, in their own unique way, philosophical, deep things. But they mainly reflected what was going on around them, talked about the weather as it were. They were superficial.

Was having lunch with Wilson. Best not to forget this time, he might get another patented puppy dog look.

What about Cameron? He summoned a mental image of her, tried to resist adding big fake tears to her cheeks and a speech bubble above her head saying 'why me?'. She was... well, he was running out of poetry forms he knew anything about. An elegy. Sad, stately, mournful. Beautiful, he added grudgingly, but whiny stuff if you weren't into that sort of thing.

Anyway.

He glanced at the clock, grinned widely at the realization that that little exercise had eaten half an hour. Lunchtime, or close enough. Standing, he retrieved his cane from its usual position leaning against his desk and limped his way towards the cafeteria.

If Foreman was a couplet, Chase an acrostic, Cuddy a limerick, Wilson a haiku and Cameron an elegy, what was House?

"Penny for your thoughts?"

House blinked, meeting Wilson's gaze. Penny for his thoughts, he thought darkly. It'd take a lot more than a lousy penny to get him to reveal what he was thinking about, not with the threat of Talks looming.

"Poetry and it's relevance to society today. What do you think?"

He got a reproachful look.

"Sorry for asking. We still having lunch?"

"Certainly, haiku boy."

Wilson paused, opened his mouth, before closing it and turning to stride off down the corridor, shaking his head and muttering something like 'I don't want to know' under his breath. House shrugged.

What was he?

He was far too complex to be classified as a mere poem, that was what he was.

Grinning to himself, he set off in his loping, rhythmical gait after Wilson, the tap of the cane on the tile like punctuation in the lines of movement.

Nothing like poetry at all.

* * *

_Reviews must rhyme, if you've got the time. __Not really. Seriously, dude, no rhymes. I take it back. Oh god, I've put the idea in your heads now. Spare me._


End file.
